GABRIELLE WITTKOP THE NECROPHILIAC PDF

This post stands in the controversial shadow of its title. You have been warned. Quote: Sex is spoken of in all forms except one. Necrophiliac love: the only sort that is pure. Because even amor intellectualis — that great white rose —waits to be paid in return. No counterpart for the necrophiliac in love, the gift that he gives of himself awakens no enthusiasm.

Share via Email Deadpan Gabrielle Wittkop. So I found myself somewhat discomfited when, on the tube, I took out this book and started reading. It is in diary form, recording the amorous exploits of one Lucien, an antiques shop owner who exclusively prefers to have sex with the dead sex and age immaterial, we learn.

The book begins with his description of a dead young girl with "the sly, ironic smile of those who know a lot". The next day "the little girl played a mean trick on me. While I was sliding into that flesh so soft, so cold, so deliciously tight, the child abruptly opened an eye, translucent like that of an octopus. This is, after all, a family newspaper.

I will spare you the details except to say that Gabrielle Wittkop had obviously given some thought to the kinds of things that can happen when having sex with the dead. She puts us right there, sparing us nothing. I checked carefully to see if anyone had been reading over my shoulder, and slowly put the book back in my pocket. Artists who like to shock readers out of the conventional proprieties can be accused of doing it just to get a rise out of us, so to speak.

And the astonishing opening of The Necrophiliac can be seen as a kind of hurdle. Balk at this, the author seems to be saying, and perhaps the rest of this book is not for you.

There are superficial similarities with the diarist of The Necrophiliac: snobbishness and fastidiousness, which seems to go so well with forbidden loves. There is also the daring challenge to the reader: what, we are asked, can you see beyond the perversion? Wittkop, whose first novel this was published when she was 52, in ; never before translated into English, amazingly certainly seems, from the little I know about her, to be the kind of writer who enjoyed freaking out her audience.

I can imagine her, in an idle moment, wondering how to shock the petit bourgeoisie, thinking "Ah! As with Nabokov, the comedy comes from the difference between how our narrator writes and what he gets up to. And you can see Wittkop, deadpan, wondering what she can get away with next — rather like Lucien. Or if it sheltered itself, in cowardly fashion, behind allegory. It is the apotheosis of sick humour, the kind that makes us both laugh and confront things we would normally rather not.

Gabrielle Wittkop

Share via Email Deadpan Gabrielle Wittkop. So I found myself somewhat discomfited when, on the tube, I took out this book and started reading. It is in diary form, recording the amorous exploits of one Lucien, an antiques shop owner who exclusively prefers to have sex with the dead sex and age immaterial, we learn. The book begins with his description of a dead young girl with "the sly, ironic smile of those who know a lot".

Wittkop’s Necrophiliac

Yevgeniya Traps From the Reviews: "I will spare you the details except to say that Gabrielle Wittkop had obviously given some thought to the kinds of things that can happen when having sex with the dead. She puts us right there, sparing us nothing. This would be a poor and revolting little book fewer than pages, which is quite enough, really if it did not have such a poised tone and sensibility, such intelligence, behind it. Or if it sheltered itself, in cowardly fashion, behind allegory.

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